The food blogging adventures of a Canadian twenty-one year old who frequently whips up awful puns.

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When I first wrote a recipe tutorial for French macarons in 2012, I couldn’t have imagined that, even to this day, it would be the most popular post on IronWhisk. Back then, the macaron craze was just gaining steam. Today, the almond-meringue cookies, which sandwich a ganache or jam filling, are ubiquitous.

The macaron’s popularity means a plethora of surprisingly different recipes are available to play with. What, then, is the best way to make this famous cookie? Over the past few weeks, I have made it my mission to find out. After getting my hands on the formerly secret recipes of the world’s top pastry chefs, and baking dozens of batches and hundreds of macarons, my side-by-side tests and surveys provide the much-needed answers.

Ladurée Patisserie’s La Fraise(French for simplyStrawberry) caught my eye two weeks ago, when I was vacationing in London. After interrogating a sales associate with a barrage of questions, I learned that the interior of La Fraiseconsists of fluffy coconut sponge cake and house-made strawberry compote enrobed in a heavenly strawberry crème mousseline.

The crème is then covered with strawberry-red dacquoise cake, studded with royal icing “seeds”, and impaled with a gum paste stem before being neatly arranged in rows in the Ladurée display case. Don’t be turned off by the cartoony, almost gimmicky appearance of this eye-catching entremet cake; La Fraise is incredibly tasty.